Penn Medicine taps big data to save lives

The potential to deliver better healthcare has been one of the driving factors behind the push for big data analytics in medicine in recent years. The fact that the potential is there doesn't mean every project succeeds. Penn Medicine's big data projects, however, have already hit several milestones, and they are being successfully used within the organization, which is composed of the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and its health system of five hospitals. Initial applications have centered on predictive analytics on individual patients at risk for two conditions: sepsis and heart failure. Now Penn Medicine is getting set to release its open source real-time application platform, Penn Signals, to other organizations, too.